Fiction as Strange as Truth From a Local Ex-Reporter

All those years working as a newspaper reporter have paid off for Brea author Jackie Hyman.

The heroine of Hyman’s new Orange County-set suspense-thriller “Echoes” is Laura Bennett, a young reporter who, in investigating the sudden death of a U.S. senator, begins to uncover unexplained phenomena that link his death with other strange events.

Indeed, some unusual and sinister things are happening in San Paradiso, Hyman’s fictional Orange County town.

The mayor was the last person to see three local women before each was brutally murdered. But he knows he didn’t kill them--at least he doesn’t remember killing them.

The senator’s wife, a former B-movie actress, receives an anonymous package containing a photo of herself at an orgy she had fantasized about. But she knows it never really happened.

And Bennett, who is haunted by childhood memories of her father’s plunge into madness, discovers that her lover, a judge, is not acting like himself.

Hyman’s publisher, Morrow, is promoting “Echoes” as “a slam-bang supernatural thriller skillfully combining elements of ‘The Omen’ and ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ . . . What unfolds is a waking nightmare, as a plague of demonic duplicates turns Orange County red with blood in a tidal wave of murder, rape and blackmail.”

Hyman, who quit newspaper work in 1983 to devote full time to writing fiction, has written 23 romance novels under such various pen names as Jacqueline Diamond, Jacqueline Topaz and Jacqueline Jade.

“Echoes” is her second thriller under her own name. (Her first was “The Eyes of a Stranger,” also set in Orange County.)

“I’ve enjoyed the romances, and I think I’ve done a good job on them,” she said. “I’d never slight them, but I do like to be able to try different things and not hold back and restrict my thinking.”

In creating the young reporter in “Echoes,” Hyman tapped into her six years as a reporter with the Orange Coast Daily Pilot in Costa Mesa and three years with the Associated Press in Los Angeles.

“I used my reporting experience both in the actual setting and the details of how the news is gathered, and also the feeling you get as a reporter on how the community functions,” she said. “A reporter on a fairly small paper who has a small city as her beat has an incredible range (of experiences) and is an amazing resource person.”

As for newspaper work being good preparation for writing novels, Hyman said: “I think the writing (experience) is good. But it can handicap you in that your style may tend to be very terse. On the other hand, you get used to writing to deadline and not giving into writer’s block.”

Although much of “Echoes” occurs in Newport Beach, Hyman chose to create a fictional town for the main action to avoid the potential of libeling someone or having to worry about the irrelevant details about how a town actually functions.

She nevertheless wanted San Paradiso to be as realistically “normal” as possible.

“One of the things I don’t like about a lot of horror novels is they take place where you’d never actually go--where the mayor looks like Burgess Meredith and the real estate agent looks like Boris Karloff--and if you did go there you’d leave.

“I wanted to write something really frightening. To me the most frightening thing would be to live in this perfectly normal place and these strange things start happening, and you realize there is no escape.

“I find that more frightening than some weird, small town.”

Book Signings: Jackie Hyman (“Echoes”) will sign from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday at Book Carnival, 870 N. Tustin Ave., Orange. . . . Illustrator Jose Aruego (“Musical Max”) will sign from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday at the Children’s Book Cottage, 30100 Town Center Drive, Laguna Niguel. . . . Children’s author Alvin Schwartz (“Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” “In a Dark, Dark Room”) will sign from 3 to 5 p.m. Wednesday at the Reading Rhinoceros, 24000 Alicia Parkway, Mission Viejo. . . . Zig Ziglar (“Courtship After Marriage”) will sign from 3 to 5 p.m. Wednesday at Brentano’s in South Coast Plaza.

Play Reading: Members of the South Orange County Community Theater will read Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Our Town,” at 8 tonight at Upchurch-Brown Booksellers, 384 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach. $2 donation.

Readers’ Theater: Laguna Beach author T. Jefferson Parker (“Little Saigon”) will read with the audience from his mystery novel at 7:30 tonight during Steve Mellow’s Readers’ Theater at the San Juan Capistrano Regional Library, 31495 El Camino Real. There also will be readings from Elmore Leonard’s “Get Shorty” and Jean Kerr’s “Don Brown’s Body,” and a tribute to Mickey Spillane. Free.

The program will be repeated at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Newport Beach Public Library, 856 San Clemente Drive. For more information call (714) 972-1690.

National Writers: Author Kay Wilson Klem will discuss writing the historical novel at the meeting of the Southern California chapter of the National Writers Club at 10 a.m. Saturday at the Irvine Marriott, 18000 Von Karman Ave., Irvine. Members, $10; non-members, $12.

Workshop: The Book Inside You, a six-week workshop for writers taught by author and communications consultant Joan Talmage Weiss, will be held from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. beginning Tuesday at her office, 2669 S. Coast Highway, Laguna Beach. Fee: $125, includes materials.

Book Talk: The Orange Library’s Let’s Talk Books group will discuss books about the West or by a Western author at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the library, 101 N. Center St.